Chapter 2
Levi
I’m elbow-deep in a patch kit at six in the morning because the port side of Raft Two has a slow leak and I’ve been telling myself I’ll fix it tomorrow for four tomorrows in a row.
“Group of six today,” I tell him, spreading adhesive on the patch. “Noah’s girlfriend’s sister organized it. College reunion. He says she’s intense.”
Kai pulls a strap through a buckle.
“Type-A. Plans everything. Should be fun, though. High energy groups are the best groups.”
Kai pulls another strap.
“You’re incredible company, you know that?”
He glances at me. Goes back to the strap. I grin and press the patch into place and hold it while the adhesive sets.
The morning is warm already. The river is running clean, the sound of it filling the lot the way it always does.
Constant. Steady. The thing I built this business around, literally.
Wylde Mountain Outfitters sits thirty feet from the put-in on a piece of land I bought with money I didn’t have at twenty-three.
The sign above the office door says WYLDE MOUNTAIN OUTFITTERS in green paint.
It used to say something else underneath.
Two names. I painted over the second one three years ago and the wood grain still holds the shadow if you know where to look.
I don’t look.
“Should be a good day,” I say. And I mean it.
I like these trips. Six women on a reunion, mid-summer, the river running at perfect levels.
Groups like this show up ready to have fun and that’s the only thing I need.
I’ll make them scream through the rapids and laugh on the calm water and tell their friends and I’ll do it again day after tomorrow.
This is the job. This is the life. I’m good at this.
The patch holds. I clean up the kit and start loading paddles.
They pull into the lot at 8:20, ten minutes early, and I know immediately which one is Marissa.
Not because Noah described her. He barely did.
Just said she’d be the one in charge. But I would have known anyway because she’s out of the van first, clipboard in hand, directing the other five toward the equipment rack like a woman who has been managing this situation since before she arrived.
She’s not the tallest or the loudest. She’s the one the other five orient to.
They arrange themselves around her without thinking about it.
I notice this the way a guide notices a current. Professionally. Then she turns around and I stop noticing things professionally.
She’s not the kind of pretty that announces itself.
She’s the kind that gets sharper the longer you look.
Dark hair, striking face, eyes that are already assessing the operation before I’ve said a word.
She’s looking at the equipment rack, the trailer, the raft, the river.
I can actually watch her forming opinions about all of it.
Including me.
I’ve guided hundreds of groups. I’ve had women flirt, leave numbers on tip envelopes, find reasons to stay after the trip. I have never once forgotten what I was doing because a client looked at me.
I pick up the paddle I dropped. Kai, securing a strap four feet away, does not comment on this. Very generous of him.
“All right, ladies.” I grab a paddle and put it over my shoulder because it gives my hands something to do. “Who’s ready to get wet?”
Standard line. Said it to a hundred groups.
I walk toward them with the grin I’ve been wearing since I was old enough to know it works, and I feel the exact moment her eyes land on me.
She’s evaluating. Not flirting, not nervous, not impressed.
Evaluating. Like I’m a line item on a spreadsheet she hasn’t approved yet.
I introduce Kai. I explain the safety kayak. Claire (the one with the weather app and the highlighted waiver) asks how often people fall out. I give her the answer I always give. “Hasn’t happened in weeks.” It works. It always works.
Then I look at the woman with the clipboard.
“You’re Marissa,” I say.
“How’d you know?”
“Noah told me you’d be the one running the show.” I look at the clipboard. She doesn’t seem to realize she’s still holding it. “He was right.”
“I like to be organized.”
“You’re holding a laminated schedule.”
“It’s day one. There’s a lot to coordinate.”
I hold her eyes. She holds mine right back. Doesn’t look away, doesn’t blush, doesn’t do any of the things people usually do when I aim the full grin at them. She just looks at me like she’s deciding something and hasn’t decided yet.
Here’s the thing. I have been charming my whole life.
I’m good at this. The grin, the eye contact, the voice that makes people feel like they’re the only person at the put-in.
It’s not fake. I genuinely like people. But it’s a skill and I know I have it, and I have never once thought of it as a performance.
Until this woman looks at me like she can see the seams.
I go back to the safety briefing. I’m fine. Completely fine.
On the water, she paddles clean. She follows commands without hesitation. She watches the canyon like she’s memorizing it. And every time I scan the group (which a guide does constantly, this is the job, this is normal), my eyes end up on her.
On the calm stretch before the Class III, she looks back at me and I ask if she’s doing okay because that’s what a guide says. She tells me she’s assessing the operation.
Then she tells me my website is terrible.
My website.
From the middle of my raft, on the middle of my river, this woman I met forty minutes ago takes apart my homepage, my booking system, and my social media presence with the calm precision of someone who does this for a living.
Because she does this for a living. Her friend Claire nods along like she’s been waiting for someone to say it.
Nobody has ever done this to me. Not on the river, not in a bar, not anywhere. Nobody has ever looked at me mid-rapid and thought “I should audit this man’s digital marketing strategy.”
I laugh. And the sound that comes out is not the guide laugh. Not the warm, smooth, everyone-relax laugh I’ve been running since I was twenty. It’s real. It comes from the part of me that was not prepared for this woman and is not adjusting fast enough.
I hear the difference. She hears it too. I see her register it.
“Did you just audit my business from the middle of my raft?”
“I multitask.”
She does. She absolutely does.
The Class III hits. I call the commands. The water drops and I know every rock and every current and my job is to keep six women safe and my focus should be on the river.
My focus is on her.
The wave crests the bow and drenches her completely. Jenna screams. Claire screams. Paige screams. Marissa throws her head back and laughs.
Full volume. She’s soaking wet and freezing and she’s laughing like the river just handed her a gift and she caught it with both hands.
I have guided hundreds of trips. Thousands of people on this water.
I’ve seen every reaction a person can have to a rapid.
Screaming, crying, nervous laughter, quiet awe, the occasional person who goes completely still.
I have never seen anyone take a wave to the face and come up laughing like that.
Like being alive is the funniest, best thing that’s ever happened to her.
The grin drops off my face.
I don’t choose it. I don’t decide it. It just goes. She’s looking back at me with water running down her jaw and her hair plastered to her face and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on this river.
Half a second. I’m looking at her and I’m not charming and I’m not the fun guide with the crooked smile. I’m just a man looking at a woman and not having a single smooth thing to say about it.
I put the grin back on. Because that’s what I do.
“Trouble,” I say.
The word comes out different than I meant it to. I meant it as the recovery. The mask going back on. The fun guide calling the spirited client a nickname because that’s the kind of thing fun guides do. But it comes out like a fact. Like a diagnosis I just confirmed.
“Excuse me?”
“You.” I point my paddle at her. “Trouble.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Don’t need to. Twelve years on this river. I know it when I see it.”
She turns forward. Her friends make sounds behind her. I go back to guiding because there are rapids ahead and people’s safety depends on me and I am a professional.
I am also completely, catastrophically not fine.
The rest of the trip I do my job. I run the rapids.
I call the commands. I tell the canyon stories I always tell.
I am the guide I’ve always been. I also spend an unreasonable amount of time watching Marissa Dodson.
She gestures when she talks. She touches her friends’ arms when she’s making a point.
She checks on the quiet one (Paige, the one paddling too hard, the one working through something she’s not talking about) without making it obvious.
She’s not trying to be interesting. She’s just being herself. That’s the whole problem.
At the take-out, I collect paddles. I have a plan. The plan is: be professional, say goodbye, go back to my life.
“Day after tomorrow’s a longer run,” I tell her. Casual. Professional. My voice is exactly where it should be. “Class IV at the end. If your group’s up for it.”
“I’ll check the schedule.”
“The laminated one?”
“It’s a highly effective organizational tool.”
I grin. The crooked one. The one I can’t seem to stop aiming at her. “See you the day after tomorrow, trouble.”
“That is not my name.”
“No,” I say. “It’s better.”
She walks toward the van with her friends. I watch her go.
One second. Two. Five. Seven.
“You’re still looking,” Kai says behind me. Flat. Not a question.
I pick up a PFD and start checking buckles. “I’m doing an equipment inventory.”
“You’re looking at the parking lot. The equipment is behind you.”
I turn around. The equipment is behind me. Kai is already walking toward the trailer. His shoulders move once in what might be a laugh if Kai were the kind of person who laughed a lot. He is not.
The lot empties. Kai leaves at four with a nod that means goodbye and see you tomorrow and I am choosing not to say the thing I could say right now. I appreciate this about Kai.
I sit in the office. It’s small. One desk, one chair, a filing cabinet, a laptop running software from half a decade ago. There used to be two desks in here. The second one’s in storage. I moved it out three years ago because it’s hard to run a one-man operation staring at a two-man office.
The late sun comes through the window. I can hear the river. I’m sitting in the space I built and I’m thinking about a woman who looked at this place for forty seconds and saw everything wrong with it. The website. The booking system. The Instagram.
She saw what it could be. She looked at something rough and saw potential.
Danny used to do that. Look at a thing and see what it could become. He looked at this stretch of river and saw an outfitting company. He looked at me and saw a partner. He was right about the river. He was wrong about me being someone you could build with safely.
The thought arrives and passes. I let it go. The river outside sounds the same way it always sounds.
I close the laptop. Lock the office. Walk to the put-in and stand at the edge of the water because this is what I do when the work is done and the lot is empty and it’s just me and the river.
I called her trouble. On the raft after she came up laughing. At the take-out when I said it like a goodbye. Each time the word felt different coming out. The first time was a mask going back on. The second was me trying to keep it light.
Hopefully she’ll be back in my raft day after tomorrow. With her clipboard and her opinions and her laugh that fills a canyon.
I said “trouble” because it was the first thing I thought of.
I’m starting to think I’m the one in it, though.